L2/05-364 From: Christopher Fynn Date: 2005-11-03 Subject: Re: New Tibetan Proposals Andrew West wrote: > Chris, > Thanks for providing your comments so swiftly. I appreciate what you > say about the head marks, and think that you have made some valid > observations. > Just to clarify a couple of points: > I understand that there are many ornate forms of head mark in > existence, but this proposal explicitly restricts itself to characters > that are required by scholars of early Tibetan manuscripts. It > deliberately does not cover other forms of head mark, as this beyond > the scope of the proposal. This in no way implies that other proposals > for other forms of head marks may not be needed. I am interested in > early Tibetan texts so I think it is appropriate for me to make a > proposal relating to characters needed to represent these texts; I am > not so interested in the sort of texts which use other forms of head > marks, so I am not planning to write a proposal for them. In the > absence of a consensus amongst the members of TIBEX as to what > additional Tibetan characters are required for encoding, I think it is > probably best for people to make individual proposals relating to > characters that are of particular concern to them. > The term archaic is perhaps a little contentious as the single-line > form of head mark can be seen in more recent texts; but I think that > it is appropriate because in the early manuscripts and monumental > inscriptions the single line form is used exclusively. I went through > hundreds and hundreds of items in the International Dunhuang Project > (IDP) on-line database looking for examples of double tsheg usage, and > although I did not originally intend to propose any new head mark > characters, the ubiquity of this form of the head mark in early > manuscripts convinced me that you could not ignore it or treat it as a > simple glyph variant of 0F04. > BTW, I have notified the Chinese representative on WG2 of these > proposals, and have asked him to seek feedback on them from the > appropriate Tibetan experts. > Best Regards, > > Andrew Andrew It is this very ubiquity or fact that *all* examples of archaic Tibetan texts use single line head marks; that many forms of cursive Tibetan (which have undergone less modifications in form than modern dbu-can ) still use only single line head marks; and that modern dbu-can [almost] always uses double line head marks, only seems to add weight to the argument that the double line form is just the modern glyph variant of the original single line form. At some point there must either have been an orthographic "reform" or maybe some scribe simply started writing the more embellished double line form and (Tibetans loving elaborate embellished things) it became the preferred form - the simpler older form pretty well dropping out of use (at least in dbu-can). Now if the double line form is simply a glyph variant of a simpler older form and conveys no different meaning - do we need to make this distinction in *plain text*? We can already include as many variants as we want in an OpenType font and have these available for selection using a discretionary lookup - or we could create an "old style" Tibetan font which has single line glyphs for U+0F04 & U+0F05. There are many examples of texts where both single and double tsheg characters occur in the same line of text - so there is strong evidence for having both single and double tsheg characters encoded. OTOH we have yet to find an example of a text where both single and double line forms of U+0F04 & U+0F05 occur. IMO the strongest evidence for encoding thee two additional characters would be such an example - a text where *both* the single and the double line forms of head marks occur. - Chris --------------------------------------------------------- From: Christopher Fynn Date: 2005-11-03 Subject: Re: New Tibetan Proposals Andrew West wrote: > On 27/10/05, Robert R. Chilton <acip@well.com> wrote: >>With regard to the second proposal, I fully agree about the need for >>NYIS TSHEG and I don't see any problem with using this for both the >>archaic and modern (editorial) usages. Yes I don't think there should be any argument about the need for encoding this character as it it is very well attested. Incidentally Csoma de Kor�s' Grammar illustrates another type of TSHEG - larger that the usual one. I don't have the book here but I think he calls it TSHEG CHEN or something like that. Have any of you seen other evidence for such a character? >> As for the archaic head marks, I >>do have some question as to whether the "traditional" marks (encoded at >>U+0F04 and U+0F05) are equivalent but somewhat embellished versions of >>the proposed archaic forms. (You may remember that I have raised >>similar questions in past discussions regarding proposals to encode >>variant forms of the terminal SHAD character.) > I agree that these are the most problematic of the proposed > characters, and I thought long and hard about whether to include them > in the proposal or not; but it seemed to me that if you want to encode > the double tsheg then you have to encode them as well. Why? The double tsheg often occurs together with single tsheg in the same document - frequently both are used at different places in the same line of text - so different characters are needed. OTOH, as you point out, in these archaic documents we find *only* the single line form of the head marks - so if someone wants these they could probably just use a font with the single line glyph form for the existing head mark characters. > As you say, the > traditional forms of head mark are just ornate versions of the > proposed "archaic" forms, but scholars dealing with early Tibetan > manuscripts like to be able to represent the exact forms of letters > and marks, as seen by the typeset edition of the Tibetan mss at the > BNP (this was the killer argument in favour of separate encoding for > me). If they want to represent exact forms of letters & marks then they should probably use an archaic *style* Tibetan font. There are after all differences in a number of the letter forms between early dbu-can and contemporary forms of the script. >>On the whole, I do not see much problem with encoding these archaic head >>marks -- aside from the problem of the existing precomposed character >>U+0F07, which you address in your proposal. Something that perhaps needs to be addressed is that in many cursive and semi-cursive forms of Tibetan script - including formal styles used for writing pecha - the head marks are pretty well always written with a single not a double stroke. When we make fonts for these script styles are we to create artificial double stroke head marks to map to the existing U+0F04 & U+0F05 and map the usual (for these styles) single stroke forms to the new characters? - or should we double map the existing head mark characters *and* the proposed new characters to single glyph forms? Or do we have to create new, & artificial for these forms of Tibetan script, double line head marks? > I think that there are probably less problems with encoding these than > with the myriad shad variants that have been discussed previously. I have a copies of a few Tibetan texts back in the UK where variant (less & more elaborate) forms of RGYA GRAM SHAD & SBRUL SHAD occur - and are used in a clearly hierarchical manner to indicate section, sub-section, and sub-sub-section & topic sub-topic and sub-sub-topic. In much the same way as different levels of outline heading are used in modern word-processed documents. Here these different forms convey meaning as they clearly indicate different levels (and nested levels) in the structure of the text. IMO these texts provide a strong case for encoding additional RGYA GRAM SHAD & SBRUL SHAD characters. If we could find a text where both single and double line forms of YIG MGO are similarly used then I believe there would also be a strong argument for encoding the additional YIG MGO characters you propose. > They will be useful to scholars of early Tibetan texts, and can be > safely ignored by most other people. If a distinction between single and double stroke head marks is "useful to scholars of early Tibetan texts" and the characters "can safely be ignored by most other people" surely being able to distinguish between different forms of terminal shad marks would be just as useful (and just as ignorable)? One way of encoding a distinction, and at the same time making it easily ignorable, might be to use specified variation selector characters. Scholars and applications which need to make such distinctions in plain text can use the variation selector characters to do this while the rest can treat the variation selector characters as ignorables. - Chris